I'd be delighted if Mike were to stop being a public figure; but so long as that lamentable state continues, it'll have to be pretty damn good to be defamatory.

(edit: also, isn't it totally 100% shocking that a former FBI agent whose wife was, until fairly recently, president and CEO of some creepy private security contractor might be Bad News on the authoritarianism side?)

Glad he and his wife could cash in at our expense while we're still the last industrialized nation to not have a single payer system for health care that leads to the agonizing deaths of over 45,000 Americans every year. Not to mention the countless more that suffer in the meantime.

I wonder how fantastic Mike and his wife's health care plan is? I guess they're "covered".

I shared this on my FB page. Something I rarely do. I try to keep that space for friends and fun stuff. But this fucker just really gets my goat. This is the kind of people we elect to our government??? FSM help us.

Pfft. Apparently "well-aware" means not aware enough to know Mike Masnik is by no means liberal (economically). If anything he's a free-market conservative.He's been working for years explaining how IP law is essentially industrial protectionism, and if you think about it, IP law can be considered a type of welfare.

I think he may be using 'liberal' as a pejorative form of 'non-fascist', rather than according to its more commonly accepted definition. It seems to be a thing in certain dialects of American English, not certain why.

I am currently enrolled in community college. Last year, I took a fascinating class, called "Legal Environment of Business," a primer on basic legal theory and terminology. About half of the students were fairly bright/engaged, and about half had somehow managed to graduate high school (i.e. obnoxiously proud of their ability to function at a 4th grade level). It took everyone about ten minutes to grasp the basics of this topic.

Assuming that they are not just simply being cynical, what does this say about the capacity of this politician and his staff?

Make that "just enough of a majority voted for him to win" because I sure didn't. I emailed him the other day about my disapproval of the whole sordid NSA business trampling on my 4th amendment rights and this is how the email response to me opened,

"At a time when the Obama administration’s IRS, Benghazi and Justice Department scandals have understandably damaged Americans’ trust in their government, it is important to understand why these programs are different. "

Um, no. my sceptiscm about my government has very little to do with the Obama administration, but rather its pursuit of a Do as We Say, Not as We Do policy in just about every freakin' bit of our foreign policy. That hypocrisy has turned the world against us and its starting to stink things up at home too.